WASHINGTON – In last week’s TV special about the government’s eco-friendly brainwashing of our kids, ABC’s John Stossel exposed probably the No. 1 reason for home-schooling. But he didn’t go far enough.

The danger to our kids doesn’t stop at misinformation about basic physical science. Greenpeace and other environmental activists who are writing classroom lesson plans these days have a bigger agenda than saving the Amazon or spotted owl.

They want global collectivism.

The lies about the environment are merely a vehicle to move kids closer to accepting Marxism and atheism (or, its cousin, pantheism, in which all religions are valued equally). Call it gateway propaganda.

The hidden message in the environmental movement is anti-capitalism, anti-individualism, anti-God and, ultimately, anti-America, since it’s upon all these things that this country was founded.

Anti-capitalism

Global-warming alarmists have convinced kids (not to mention many gullible politicians and journalists) that CO2-spewing factories are causing a “greenhouse effect” that will overheat the planet and trigger a chain of disasters.

Who’s the villain? Industry. Why does industry pollute? To make profits. You get the point.

Of course, volcanoes have been spewing heat-trapping greenhouse gases since the earth’s mantle was formed. All the smokestacks and tailpipes in the world couldn’t compete with Mount St. Helen’s or Mount Pinatubo’s carbon belches.

After school, children’s minds are polluted with more industry-bashing green propaganda, thanks to Hollywood nature nuts like capitalist-turned-socialist Ted Turner.

In his TBS cartoon “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” industrialists aren’t just greedy,
they’re downright evil, polluting just for the hell of it – until the teen-green superheroes rescue the planet from their dirty mitts.

Anti-individualism

We’re all together on the good ship Earth, or so goes the new classroom sermon. Share resources, don’t waste. “Reduce, reuse, recycle.” In some schools the pledge to recycle is recited more often than the Pledge of Allegiance.

But what kids aren’t taught is that most recycling doesn’t work and makes no economic sense at all. If you recycle, chances are you’re wasting your time.

Because plastics are so hard to sort and separate, only about 2 percent of bottles and other plastics ever get recycled. Sorting costs can run as high as $1,500 a ton, far outstripping any revenue. Companies and cities just have no incentive to do it, so backlogs just grow higher and higher.

Some cities actually have to pay recyclers to take newspapers. Why? It’s too costly to invest in the de-inking machines and other equipment used in recycling them. Recycling a newspaper is 10 times as expensive as dumping it in a landfill.

Environmental extremism is a perfect fit for the secular public-school system. It teaches kids that humans do not have dominion over animals, that our resources and lives are limited.

The green curriculum completely removes God from the picture. This world is all you’ve got, goes the message to kids, so better take care. Store up your treasures on earth, not Heaven, and worship Mother Nature.

It’s eco-theology for kids. No wonder so many 20-somethings backpack in the Costa Rican rain forest between rounds of body-piercings, rather than pursue jobs in middle management.